Richards on Kaplan in Sierra Leone:

I know the road from Freetown to Bo very well. The young men hanging out in the roadside villages are often firewood sellers waiting for custom. Robert Kaplan has a thing about deforestation. It is, he imagines, a prime cause of the social instability in Sierra Leone. The firewood only reinforces his fears. But his worry is, in fact, completely misplaced. This is not the Sahel. Recent research shows there is more forest in Sierra Leone than at the turn of the century. Science also confirms common sense, that in a high- rainfall tropical environment, there is no more effective way of producing firewood than by cropping the bush. Natural regrowth is actually more productive than any fuelwood plantation. Firewood is the fuel of the poor, demand is high, and the highway offers good transportation. The lads selling firewood by the road are doing something perfectly sensible. They are finding work.

And surly-faced they might have been but were they really so threatening? Mr Kaplan calls them "loose molecules". But he appears not to have engaged them much in conversation.

Krijn Peters and I have had better luck in talking to teenage fighters from all factions in the Sierra Leone war about their hopes and fears. Their stories are truly astonishing. As potentially loyal to local communities as anyone Mr Kaplan ever met in Vancouver they have a common enemy - politicians too busy fishing in overseas ponds. They see their violence not as anarchic bickering over scraps, but a life-and-death struggle against a political elite pursuing global riches at the expense of domestic improvement. The well- travelled, highly-educated, yellow-eyed politician who persuaded Mr Kaplan that Sierra Leonean youths were cultureless criminals is an embodiment of the enemy against whom they fight. If the rebels burn the UN compound it is because the UN is full of successful educated West Africans who have abandoned their countries (so the fighters believe). In some parts of Latin America street kids are hunted by right-wing vigilantes; in Sierra Leone, encouraged by the rabble-rousing Colonel Gaddafi, the street kids have struck first.

- anthropologist Paul Richards